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MAR 12 jgoo 
THE CAUSE OF 

HOG CHOLERA; 
How it is Created on the Farm, 



AND 



HOW TO PREVENT IT 

IN A NATURAL WAY 

WITHOUT MEDICINE UNO WITHOUT EXPENSE, 



—BY 

WILLIAM JAMKS HUNTKR. 



The Information You Have Been Looking for for Years, 
You will Find Between the Covers of This Bool(. 






THE CAUSE OF 

HOG CHOLERA; 
How it is Created on the Farm, 



AND 



HOW TO PREVENT IT 

IN A NATURAL WAY 

wiiHOUT MEDiciNt m wiTHoyi mmi 



BY 

WILLIAM JAMES HUNTER, 



The Information You Have Been Looking for for Years, 
You will Find Between the Covers of This Book. 



L JUr&r^ of COBgret% .^^ 

__ ;i i n fid .it ^4 .^ .^-^.^^^..^.^^ 



MAR 1 2 1»00 



PREFACE. 



I ask you to please read the book from the beginning, 
dear away some of those can't-be-dones from your mind, and 
allow your brains to be useful to you. Allow them to think 
about real things and not blockade them with unreal things. 
Do not judge the book by its construction, but by the facts it 
states and teaches. Remember the author is a farmer, and 
the book is written from experience, observation and records 
of five years; also it is written in this form to break down all 
the superstition in regard to the subject that is in sight. Now 
if you are a hog raiser I ask you to read the book through, 
and do your criticising afterwards. Do not read part of the 
book and go to forming conclusions. But I ask you to read 
it slowly and to the end, and then see if it has not to you the 
truth told. 

Now the Farmers. 57957 

SECOND COPV, 

V<>io D . 



CttEBOKEE TIMES, PUBLISHERS. 
CHEROKEE, IOWA. 



THE CAUSE OF HOG CHOLERA, 

How Created and How Prevented. 

{Copyright, i:)00, by William James Hunter.) 

They have always been able to tind and rectifiy then- mis- 
takes, and when the trouble has been understood it has been 
found that the Preventative has stood in the way of a better 
understanding of their business. And not with medicine. 
Medicine is for accident. You would give medicine to your 
horse after he j^ot in the corn crib and ate too much corn, to 
try and save him. But it would be a poor thing to give it as 
a preventative. Better shut the crib door and prevent the trou- 
ble by carefulness. Think three weeks and see if you can 
think of a thing that medicine will prevent that could not have 
been prevented with care in a more practical way. The pre- 
ventive in this case is what we want on the farm. The cures 
are of secondary importance. We can afford to lose our 
cures if we can become better at preventing. We do not 
want to run hospitals but farms. Now the combinations that 
it takes to produce hog cholera strong enough to kill we 
would have found before. If that man that first yelled 
that the cholera comes in the air, could have been 
caught and tied up somewhere out of our hearing. But 
as it was he got us to think it was as a ghost or a mist comes 
from the air, coming through the country as a spirit, from no 
one knew where; had no beginning, nor no end; that we were 
blameless and helpless; seem to like to come around about the 
time we had been feeding new corn awhile. So we tried to 
head him off there. We thought we would soak our old 



corn and get rid of some hogs before that time. But it made 
no difference. He would not be fooled. Well he got to be a 
bad thing; so bad that I have seen good farmers box up their 
hogs in a tight pen and cover it over. But still he would get 
in. 

I have have seen them feed medicine worth four dollars 
a gallon to keep him or her, whatnot ghost or devil, spook or 
worms, lung fever, stomach trouble; whatever he would bring 
along. And he always brought them all. He would feed it 
to keep it away. And this fellow all the time a telHng it 
comes in the air. So you see we have to find this strange 
thing and give it a name. So we call it hog cholera. But 
some are not satisfied they say. There is a lot of them. 
None of us believe in witch craft; there are none of us believe 
in spooks. We believe we are sane; we believe the air is pure 
unless something has made it impure. We beheve that that 
something could be found that has made it impure, because 
we believe in a beginning and end. We believe, then, noth- 
ing is traveling about in the air unless it started somewhere. 
We believe the bird started from its nest, we believe the smoke 
that comes from the chimney starts from a cause below; we 
believe the man got his fever-ague from the swamp that he 
lives by, that has filled the air with Poisons that act upon his 
system in that way. We believe that this poison cannot injure 
only within a limited distance. We believe w^e can cause the 
smoke to come from the chimney. We gather the w^ood, we 
put it in the stove, we strike the match, and by natural causes 
we have the smoke from the chimney. 

Now when we feed new corn to our hogs is it poisonous? 
Or does it act as the match and merely let off the Poisons? 
Now if it acts nierely as an agent to cast out devils or Poisons, 
and not as a Poison itself, what will you think? I believe we 



will have to come back to our old belief that we used to have, 
that the new corn has something to do with this hog cholera. 
And if new corn should be found to cast out devils or Poisons 
instead of casting them in, we will have to investigate what it 
bast them out of. Well now we wall say the new corn is pure 
.and sweet and good. It merely casts out devils and poisons 
iwhen fed to our bunch of hogs. So these devils and poisons 
must be in our bunch of hogs. Well, now, do not get scared 
yet. It must be pried into no matter what it is. Well, with 
the track w^e have of him now we have him tracked to our 
bunch of hogs. Well, now we will experiment a little. ' We 
will send the hired man to gather a load of new corn, and haul 
it up side of the hog pen. Now we will run those nice, young 
hogs in this pen after we have cleaned it out well, and we will 
see if we can cast out some poisonous devils. Now we have 
them, now go ahead with your new corn. Now we have been 
feeding new corn here to these hogs a long time and we don't 
see any signs of these devils or poisons coming out. Maybe 
there are no poisons or devils in nice young hogs; so let us run 
in that old sow and see if there are any in her. Will we try 
these others any longer? Yes, we will run the old sow right 
in with them. Well, do you think that if there is any devils 
or poisons in her they will go into the rest when she gets 
some of our new corn? We will see. We know the others 
have none now, because w^e have tried them. Now let us 
wait a few days and see what turns up. What, this quick? 
Why, its only been a few days since we put her in. Well, I 
tell you the poisonous devils are coming out of her. How do 
you know? Because they are entering those others, and I 
tell you they are raising hob with those others. Well, let us 
lay low and see what they will do. There seems to have too 
many of them got got into that one there. He is trying to 



vomit them out. See, they have killed this one. It must be 
they are not used to poisonous devils going down their noses, 
for you see they put their noses close to her and they likely 
run down them. Well, let us feed that shoat there some of 
our cast out; go and get a few ears of it. Does he eat it.-" 
No, he won't touch it. Well, we cannot get any of those 
devils or poisons out of him if he will not eat the cast out, and 
he has got too much of them. Well, maybe when they all 
get out of the old sow, they will stop crowding into the shoats 
so. I wi-h we had not started to cast them out in with these 
shoats, and took her off in another pen by herself so the poi- 
sonous devils could not have gone down those shoats noses 
so. Let us take her out so they cannot get any more of them, 
for I think they have enough of them now. The old sow 
looks better now, anyway, since she got those poisons out of 
her. We will keep on feeding her the cast out and she will 
soon be fat. Do you think the poisons or devils will come 
into her again? No, not as long as we give her plenty of 
cast out, and keep her here alone, and not put another one in 
with her that has devils or poisons. 

Well now, by representing new corn to be a cast out, in- 
stead of a cast in of poisonous devils, we have tracked it to that 
old sow. We have found out that there was no poisonous 
devils in the nice young hogs, but that the old sow was full of 
them; and that when we put her with them and feed her the 
cast out. the poisonous devils left her and entered the shoats by 
the nose, and they quit eating the cast out and died But the 
old sow kept eating the cast out and lived. Now we must 
learn and investigate something about this old sow. Do you 
know her.^ Just think if you are not very well acquainted 
with her; if you are not you must get so; you will learn to 
know her and learn how to cast out the poisonous devils right. 



after I have taught you to do this. But now, do not think 
we are trying to perform a miracle, we are merely tracking 
these devils and poisons with new corn, and our belief that 
new corn has something to do with them. Now don't say it 
has not, just yet, just because these poisonous devils come 
around at other times. For we may find some other things 
that cast out poisonous devils. But let us follow this track we 
have. Now we want to find out something of this cast out. 
Well, will pure, good tender new corn cast out poisonous devils 
out of an old sow that has been found to have devils or pois- 
ons in her? We expect it to or we would not have expected 
her to thrive and get fat. We know she must have the pois- 
onous devils thrown out of her or she will not thrive. Does new 
corn make a hog start to thrive quick? Yes, well then it 
must be one of the best things we have to cast out poisonous 
devils out of a hog. Now this is good news to us, we don't 
have to pay four dollars a gallon for it, we can raise this our- 
selves. Now we can say we have the new corn, the match 
that started the fire, and that we used it as we used the match 
and that we put her in among these shoats, as we put the 
wood in the stove. But we know how we gathered the wood. 
But we must find out how the sow gathered the poisonous 
devils. Well, in order to do that we must look back and find 
her when she looked something as she does now, when there 
was no poisonous devils in her. You see we can see how she 
ought to look now, since we drove the poisonous devils out of 
her. Well, she looked this w^ay, last spring, when she far- 
rowed. For awhile she kept looking Hke this, but as her pigs 
grew, she began to look different; she got so she did not care 
for the cast out because it got dry and hard for her to eat. 
Now she ought to have eaten the cast out, if she expected to 
keep the poisonous devils out of her; maybe the cast out had 



lost its virtut^. Well she kept changing, so she must have 
kept getting fuller of the poisonous devils. It was hot and 
dn' and her hide got dry and her hair looked dead, and she 
cared less for the old dry cast out. The poies of her hide 
were mostlv closed; her pigs seemed to take her strength, and 
you see how she looked when we put her in with those nice 
young hogs we used to have. Yes? Well, if that is the way 
they look when they have poisonous devils that will be better 
than to think thev are in the nice young hogs. She. the old 
sow, ate the new cast out and it had its full virtue, and it cast 
out the poisonous devils that had got into her through the long- 
summer. It cast them out into the others. They entered 
their nostrils and tilled their systems full of poisonous devils. 
If it had not entered their noses and went down so fast the 
new cast out would have driven them away. But, as it was, 
they would .sleep with their noses stuck up against her and it 
gave the cast out no chance, for a lot of them would not eat 
it. But after we took the sow to another pen and separated 
all the others, those that would eat the cast out became pure 
from poisonous devils, so we see we have allowed our hogs to 
poison themselves to death: we have been allowing one or 
more hogs to poison the herd. We know the nature of new 
corn; we can iind other things that act as a cast out of poison- 
ous devils. Now, what I tell you is this. An}- hog thai does 
not thrive for a long while, that when it begins to thrive is 
poisonous to those that are with it: that new corn is not poi- 
sonous, but merely casts off the poisons from the hog that has 
become poisonous. But it is not careful where it casts them 
to, so if you are a mind to allow them to be cast among your 
others, the poison will kill them. Rain, what does that dor- 
It helps some men raise a few hogs. It happens to be a wet 
time .when these poisons are let off. 



Now as I tell this you have a part. Your part is to un- 
derstand, and be sure you do understand. I act as the agent 
to tell this and the truth, the cast out; you as the agent to 
receive and be righted by understanding; the outcome the 
good you will receive therefrom. x\nd the cholera has no 
place There is no use of a man teUing you your house is on 
fire if you won't listen to him. You would not know the 
world is round unless you have studied about it; so you do not 
know you have a right to kick me till you have studied this. 
I have worked hard to be able to give you this information. 
But it is like a spelling book; it demands something of you; 
you must stud}^ it. If you have been expecting someone to dis- 
cover a thing that has only one cause, as a poisonous weed or 
stone or something in that Hke, that only had to be removed 
from your pen, you see you would be wrong, because the 
cause would be an unnatural one, and found long ago. An 
unnatural cause in our business is easier found than a naiural 
one. Hog cholera, or what ever you call it, is caused from a 
natural cause, caused a natural cause, caused by unnatural 
causes that can be stopped in a natural way, if you begin at 
the beginning and not at the end. 

I have written this in this form that it may be understood 
more aptly from a farmer's standpoint, that he will see that I 
do not twist the cholera around to fit the cause; that I am able 
to show him his mistake when he has produced the cholera in 
his herd. Now here is some things we do. I will do a Httle 
hog raising to show you how easy we raise the cholera as 
well as we do the hog. Twelve brood sows May ist. It does 
not matter what year if you do it this way unless providence 
helps you out. June ist. I am pleased. My hogs did all 
right through May; I am looking forward to a prosperous 
year with my hogs. Now let me say a word; we are at the 



10 

beginning of cholera, the end will come in the Fall. July ist. 
My pigs are doing very well; the old sows are running down 
some; I have been feeding them plenty of corn. Aug. ist. 
My pigs have done very well through July; I believe I will 
wean them. The old sows are not doing anything; they don't 
care for the old corn. I have been giving my pigs milk and 
stuff on the outside of the pen so they are doing quite well. 
St^pt. ist. Through August my old sows have not done any- 
thing, but the pigs are growing. The old hogs won't eat 
much of the corn; it is so dry and hard they do not care for it. 
Oct. 1st. Through September my pigs have been doing fine, 
and they are just growing like weeds. I am rolling new corn 
to tht»m now. I'll wake those old sow^s up now. Ten of 
them, the best ones, are doing all right now; I have them 
waked up now. But my pigs seem to be getting wormy. 
Oct. 15th. My hogs are doing well, all but those two old 
sows, and I think they are starting up now; but my pigs are 
wormy and they cough. Oct. i8th. My shoats are d3'ing. 
Oct. 24th. So are the old hogs, the ones that were doing the 
best. One of those two sows now has started to thrive; the 
good ones are sick. Nov. 5th. For a while they showed 
signs of getting better, but now they are dying again. The 
other one of those two sows has begun to thrive. Nov. 15th. 
They have taken a change for the better. 

What is it that has destroyed my hogs, so who is to 
blame? What do they say? Some say I feed too much new 
corn, some say it comes in the air, some say it's worms, some 
say it's fever, some say it's their lungs, some say it's their 
stomach, some say it's the devils in them. But what caused 
him to be in them, or these other things to happen to them. 
They act like this. When they begin to get sick they cough, 
vomit or scour, sometimes both sometimes costive. It seems 



11 

to hurt them to breathe. If they have a wound on them it 
won't heal. Those that are thriving and eating lots die quick. 
Those that eat only a little linger longest. Some snuffle and 
wheeze, their eyes water, they want water bad, they seem to 
live longer on some water and a little feed. I see it kills them 
quickly when it takes one that has been eating lots. They 
seem cold and want to lie in the nest and shiver. 

I came to think m}^ hogs were dying of poison. I thought 
they breathed the poison into their lungs causing them to 
wheeze; sometimes it lodged in their nostrils causing them to 
snuffle; till they got a large quantity, and when they swallow 
it it kills them, unless they vomit it up, which they do some- 
times. But if it don't kill they have a fit and vomit it up. 
Some breathe it into a full stomach getting so much before they 
can relieve themselves of any of it that it kills them quickly; 
others nature aids by scouring and vomiting, and they put up 
a fight with the poison, till their lungs give out and they be- 
come a wreck. But where the poison is is the mystery. My 
yard is clean: I have not given them anything but corn and 
watei"; it has not rained for a while. I will watch what they 
breathe. I see this one I am looking at has his nose stuck up 
against that old sow, one of those two that I have told you 
about, the one of those two that has started to thrive. Can 
he suck with his nose anything from her.^ There is no mis- 
take she must be all right, because you can see she has begun 
to thrive. Well, let's look back and see what condition she 
has been in for a long time We find she has not thrived for 
a long time. She has not cast off her hair or slicked off since 
she had her pigs She is not skin poor, but her hide is dry, 
hair dead and the pores in her hide have been mostly closed. 
But now she has started to get rid of these and her pores are 
opening, and we get no rain in the yard. My pigs sleep with 



12 

their noses against her. Is tnis a fault? My pigs have begun 
to die again. I wonder if the other one of those two is giving 
them a fresh dose. Both of these sows I have left. Is it this 
that has been killing my shoats every fall regular as clock 
work for four falls out of five? Yes, it is just my way to feed 
my hogs and shoats together. 

Now you must understand that conditions makes a differ- 
erence. Rain in the right time might save your hogs from 
having the cholera. Now the condition for the sow to be in 
is for her not to thrive for a long time. Hot weal her and dry 
helps you to get her in this condition, with her pigs suckling. 
She does not need to be skin poor. You need not be afraid 
of losing this sow; you may lose every hog you have but you 
won't lose her if 3'Ou feed her. But she will not not do her 
work killing your shoats till you change her condition by 
makincr her thrive. This will be the second condition. Now 
for the third condition. Have her where this offal that she 
will cast off will be dumped into the others lungs and systems. 
Then you will have cholera among them. Then you will take 
your bottles and tr}- to erase in a few days the effect of a 
thing that you have been three or four months bringing about. 
If the old sow casts off her coat in hot weather when they 
don't nest together, it may rain and help you out and not 
do the rest any more harm than give them a cough. If she 
starts slowly in the fall you will have a coughing, wormy 
case. But if you are feeding the old sow something that is 
just waking her right up, so to speak, why then she will kill 
them so fast that they will not have to pass through this cough- 
ing, wormy period, and if you are a worm doctor you will be 
out of a job. When your shoats are getting over it you will 
see them nest with their noses in the air. The farmer has 
been fooled so much that it is hard to make him believe there 



13 

is any help for this hog cholera. He thinks it comes in the 
air. You see how it gets into their air or breath. He thinks 
it's new corn. You see how new corn casts it into their air 
and breath. He thinks it's their lungs. You see what's the 
matter with their lung's. This fellow thinks it's their stomach. 

CD 

You ought to see how their stomach is troubled. Or he 
thinks it is bred into them. You see where it was created. 
Some think it's the devil in them. They are the nearer right, 
only they mean Satan and I mean devils, impurities and poison- 
ous matters. They think he comes from the air. I say they 
are accummulated in the old sow in the summer for want of 
something that will act upon her S3'stem, as new^ corn or any 
other good feed. 

Hog cholera in August. You have some nice hogs fat- 
tening in the summer. They are healthy and all right. You 
buy a few old sows because you see a speck in them. May- 
be 3'ou have some yourself in another lot. You put them in 
with your nice hogs to cast off their offal into the other's lungs. 
The man you bought them of, w^hy his hogs did not have the 
cholera. You put them with yours; yours die. The old sows 
slick off; yours, you say, are to blame. See, you say, those 
that I bought are well and thriving and mine died. Now, let's 
tr}' another one. We'll sa}^ you have some July or August 
pigs. These sows you cannot sell with your spring brood 
sows. Will say you missed the fall cholera; would have been 
all right if it had not been for these; late fall you wean their 
pigs; you turn these pets out, after the}^ are dry, with the 
rest; they begin to thrive; you have what's called cholera in 
the early winter; cholera in the spring is rarer; so to are these 
old sows. But some men try to raise winter pigs. This man's 
shoats the hair has all at once started to come off; what's the 
matter; he is feeding a lot of old hogs in their pen; the old 



14 

hogs were not in very bad condilion; he had not let them run 
down much; but when they started to thrive they poisoned 
the shoats some; it gave them a Hght scald of cholera; knocked 
them off their feed, causing ihem to cough and be wormy. 
Now when you have a pen of fine hogs, quit looking in the 
air for the devils, but keep your head. Nail a little tag on 
your gate like unto this: "No hog goes in here till I know he 
has been thriving some time," to put you in mind of what I 
have told vou. 

Now do not fret about a stray hog; if he comes they will 
light him. But watch yourself; you are the absent minded 
man to watch; see that some day you don't run that old sow 
that you have in that other lot in there. I see she has raised 
you six or eight fine pigs, but she has not done much for a 
long time; and she is apt to raise you something else when 
you make the conditions right. But you say, "Hunter, I think 
if I pui her in here with these hogs she will slick off and get 
fat, and make a good hog," so do I, "and I'd sell her with 
the rest and get my money out of her." Oh. no you would 
not. Why? Because the rest would have the cholera. "You 
seem to think. Hunter, me opening that gate and running that 
sow in here makes lots of difference. Now you say, Hunter, 
those old sows you have been telling me about have the chol- 
era." I say they have not, but the stuff to make the cholera 
out of. "If the}' have why don't they die?" Their lungs are 
all right; they are all right as it will prove; when you feed 
them something easily digested and take their pigs away they 
will get fat. You know this as well as I do. You say their 
pigs have given them a hard pull, and that's all that is the 
matter with them. This man will say he has from ten to 
twenty brood sows; they have with them quite a lot of pigs; 
they all run in the pasture together through the summer; he 



13 

feeds them dry corn, which they don't care much for; comes 
fall he feeds them new corn which they like; his sows have 
not done anything all summer and he knows it; he feeds them 
all together; tell him his shoats will begin to die as soon as 
the new corn give.s the old sows strength and vigor enough to 
cast off the impurities that they have retained through the 
summer; tell him that opening a gate and knowing what to do 
would do him more good than all the worm medicine he could 
lug home. We have the most cholera and most old sows af- 
ter we get the great nourishing food of new corn; then is also 
when farmers start to prepare the most old sows for market. 
Some start to feed it earlier than others consequently starts 
them up earlier; others are afraid of it for they have heard so 
much about it, and merely prolongs their troubles. There is 
no cholera in the new corn, but the corn comes on in plenty, 
the ricrht kind of a ration for to make their old sows cast off 
their impurities. By studying this you will see why new corn 
was thought to cause the cholera; same way about soaked 
corn. I have seen men, when their sows had run down, think 
they would start them up so the}' would be able to sell them 
before hog cholera time, on soaked corn; they would have it 
just the same; you see it was not the corn's fault. He had 
allowed some of them to get too poisonous, and when they 
began to thrive the very thing that they would do would be 
to throw off those poisons out of their systems. His good 
ones would begin to die, the very ones he would swear were 
well, the poor ones are living. He would swear it was not 
their fault; says his soaked corn is no good, it's Hke new corn. 
His neighbor feeds the same; his hogs had been kept up well, 
they live and he sells them. 

I have put lots of stress on old sows, but you will see 
they are the most likely to get in that condition. You see 



16 

when they are not properly fed, and suckling pigs, their 
strength is taken in that way. I tell you that you cannot 
raise hogs successfully and only one pen to put everything 
into, old and young; those that are thriving and those that are 
not thriving; that a crop of hogs are as easy to injure as a 
crop of corn; that the best thing is a feed of ground grains 
with a little oilmeal as a preventative, for it will prevent if 
given at the right time, or it will bring it on if given at the 
wrong time; that such preventatives as this, used while a sow 
is suckling her pigs, and a careful lookout for such tricks as 
these that I will tell you of, will prevent entirely your trouble. 
When you make any changes in your barrows take them 
away from the others into another pen, they need your atten- 
tion now^ Rain is a great thing for them now; not because 
they can get mud, but because it rinses them, refreshes their 
hide, helps them cast off and soaks away the poisonous mat- 
ters that the shock to their nature caused. Now those that 
start to do poorl}^ remove from this yard and hold away every 
thing till they have been thriving some time, then 3'ou can put 
thriving ones together; you see it's the interval that causes 
the trouble, lack of steadiness. You may take the best of care 
of all your hogs and neglect one old sow that you expect to raise 
you a wagon load of pigs, and when the time comes she will 
pay you dearly for it. When new corn comes she will take 
care of herself, and if only the rain will hold off and be dry 
for a while she will wreak vengeance on you; and she will be 
sly with you; she will thrive and get fat and you will not lay 
any blame on her. But if you had known it was she that 
killed those nice hogs she would have had your ax on her 
skull, but now she will get the care; she is one of the ones 
that have stayed by you; you brag about her; you have a hog 
the cholera never tackled; never was sick you say. Do you 



17 

sa}^ nature is not kind of sly? Anyway that old sow is. She 
has beaten me lots of times and has she beaten you? 

Now how you can tell your neighbor his trouble when 
his hogs are sick. Go over to his hog pen, nine chances to 
one you will see his old sow his pet, but if she is not there do 
not get fooled; he may have hauled her off to market a day or 
two ago. Find out about that. Oh, he will say, they were 
all doing fine, but I thought I'd sell them before they got it. 
Now if you had seen those that he hauled off, among them 
you would have found the one that left her mark behind her. 
And now when you want to find his cause for getting the 
cholera, be sure you get the facts that he tells you right; 
that he does not omit the very thing you want to know. A 
good man}' men will not have it any other way than their hogs, 
every one of them, were in a very thriving condition. Now 
if you are stuck, so to speak, can't see his trouble, find out all 
about his hogs, think about it a few days, look over this little 
book and you will be able to tell him easily where he made his 
mistake. Now a m.an, to be a successful hog raiser, has got to 
become master of this subject, the way they sleep breathing off 
one another. Such a lot of breathing in a small spot makes it 
absolutely necessary for the hog raiser to be skilled in keeping 
them from breathing their own poisons. 

Now here is the way one man got at me. Says he ' tell 
me. Hunter, how my hogs got the cholera?" I asked him 
how many he had lost. Says he "I lost one." 1 asked him 
how many he had. '-I only had one" says he, "shut up in a 
pen by herself." I told him she did not have the cholera. 
'•Well, what did she have" says he. I told him she died quick, 
was not sick very long, you were feeding her slops from the 
house. "Yes" says he, "that was mostly all she got." Likely 
you were cleaning out some old meat barrel that had brine 



18 

in it, or some of the family threw a lot of salty stuff in her 
slop pail, and it got mixed with something she liked and she 
ate it all. She ate more salt than you could have got her to 
eat any other way and it killed her. Next time I saw him he 
knew how his hog came to die; he looked into the cause a 
little. Before he was blinded because he thought he was 
blameless. Salt will not hurt them if it is fed to them right, 
or even mixed in their feed by a careful man, but such men, 
you will find, know what they are about; they will not ask a 
green hand to mix up salt and feed for them to give to their 
hogs. Now, remember it is the way you give the salt. Swill 
from town I would not want. I would not want to be testing 
it for salt all the time, and I would not feed it till I did test it. 
An over-dose of salt will bring on the cholera; this way you 
will make them all sick, more or less. There will be an in- 
terval before you get any of them thriving again, and this is 
a thing you don't want; you don't want any stops and starts: 
the stop is a bad thing and the start may be the cholera. Now 
you get the first one started; he casts out his impurities into 
the others lungs; the others are off their feed and his impuri- 
ties are not so bad because he has not got much of them; 
therefore the others stand it, though it holds them back. Now 
you get them all started but a few; the ones you got started 
first are doing fine, eating a large ration. You are feeding 
heavily now^ so as to get the others started; the}^ start to thrive: 
they have been in this condition a long time now. Now the 
cast off impurities from these few give the others the cholera: 
the impurities from these few are more poisonous; it is thrown 
into the lungs and stomach of hogs that are eating heavy; they 
cannot get it out of their stomach fast enough so they get so 
much in their stomach at once that it kills them; that is why 
your good ones die so fast. But you see they would not have 



19 

the cholera for some time atter they had got the dose of salt; 
so you see he would forget about the salt, and not lay the 
blame where it belongs. Now look out for this salting; if 
you want to salt them, salt them right. Throw it in the pen 
by itself and not mix it with something that they will eat too 
much. 

Now your hog house, their nest where they sleep, needs 
to be cleaned out wdth water when there is a lot of dry dust in 
it, once in a while; that dust becomes impure. Don't throw 
a little Ume in it and allow them to breathe the dust, lime and 
all, for it may throw them off their feed, and they will not 
do so well anyway. When it becomes impure enough it will 
cause you to want and need a stock food for them, which, af- 
ter you have waited a while before you use, will bring on the 
condition that will cause you to bury them. Anything that 
stands in the way to keep them all, or even one, from thriving 
needs your attention; have no interval and they can't have 
cholera. Now this man says, '-I have a remedy that will 
knock the effects of that interval into eternity." So you see 
you will eternally be the loser if you depend upon his remedy . 
Now, don't let him fool you. If you are a farmer you know 
that nothing but carefulness and foresight on your part will 
do you any good. We all know we can't neglect our corn till 
the Fourth of July and then be surprised that it fires. He 
needs to understand his crop of corn as he plants it; all his 
mistakes he will find in the fall if he has a poor crop; unless 
he can see easily the cause he can lay the blame on himself; 
there is no ghost about it. 

Now beorin at the end I have told vou to, the front end, 
and you can farm this trouble away and not have to carry a 
bottle of hog medicine in each pocket; tackle it at the wrong 
end, the last end, you will fool vour time and money away. 



20 

and maybe find yourself trying to keep the maggots from 
coming onto the carcass. Now, in regard to feeding too much 
corn, you know some farmt rs think this causes the trouble, 
they will tell you it is too heavy a feed. Here is the way 
they feed it when they get the cholera. They begin to feed 
it when it is new and tender and their hogs will eat it well 
and do well, and they feed it till it gets so hard and dry they 
will hardly eat any of it, and do nothing. Then they begin 
with the new again. Do vou call that steadiness? Right 
when his old sows need tender strength given, feed the worst. 
They don't get it; they have the dry end of this circle then. 
Here is what he says then: ''I'll not feed the new corn till 
it's dry and hard." Here is what I siy : The new corn will 
make them thrive and when it becomes old and dry it should 
be ground and mixed with other feeds for sows that are rais- 
ing pigs. There are times in the summer that it is very hot; 
your hogs almost wilt; you give them at night some dry corn; 
they lay and pant the next day. Now if you don't want an 
interval give those sows something else besides old, dry corn; 
something that will keep up their strength; that is easily di- 
gested. Dishwater will not do it, sour corn is not it either. 
Don't think because you give your hogs all the corn they can 
eat and water, that that is all there is to do. 

Now you have a bunch of nice shoats, will say thirty of 
them, in a lot by themselves, and some old hogs in another 
lot, fattening for market. You hear of the hog cholera, so 
you sell the old hogs, knock down your fence and allow your 
shoats to sleep where those old hogs have nested. You like 
enough shut them up in this pen; it is dr}^ and hot and this 
nest is very impure. The dust that the nest is made of is 
mixed with the impurities that came from those old hogs; the 
dust in the nest is two or three inches deep all over the nest. 



21 

make maybe two wagon loads of dirt. This dust is mixed 
well with the impurities that came from those old hogs that 
have nested here for a long time; it has been dry a long time. 
Now you throw a little acid around, an ounce in this lot of 
dust; a good rain would purify this nest out for } ou, and do 
you a good job. But that little bit of acid did you no good. 
Now you have stopped your shoats from thriving, and your 
shoats are getting light doses of hog cholera; but until you 
give them a dose that will kill them, you will not believe it. 
But we will sa}^ it stays hot and dry for some time, and you 
are feeding old dry corn and water to these pigs you have in 
this pen. They don't seem to do anything, you say. Now 
after a long time, after you have become satisfied that they 
should have something else with that old dry corn, you say, 
"I will make them a slop and get some hog cholera preventa- 
tive." In time you feed this slop and preventative. The best 
of the shoats start to thrive, say twenty of the thirty start to 
thrive the first week. You are rolling this slop and prevent- 
ative right to them now, so as to get the other ten started. 
You have been feeding this slop a week now. Now you lean 
your stomach against the fence and look over at them, this 
morning. Do you see that one there? He is one of the first 
ones that you got started. Do you see him all at once stop 
eating and walk off as if he did not care to eat? See him 
stand over there; after awhile he comes back and eats as if he 
was very hungry. There go some more doing the same 
thing. Count and see how^ many there are that are not thriv- 
ing now, of those ten. Eight, you say? Next morning. 
More of them have those walking spells, you say? You say 
they are bothered with worms and you say you gave them 
some turpentine; you say you saw them walk off and vomit, 
and after awhile come back and go to eating again. Mark 



those eight, and count and see how many there are that are 
not thriving. Can't find only six? Well, mark the six. 
Morning after, did not care whether they got out of the nest 
or not. You say one came out and started to eat, and fell 
over and had a fit. You say when you kicked them out of 
the nest that they acted as if they had slept in a room where 
the gas had been blow^n out. You think they feel better now. 
since they have been out awhile: you say you're going to 
move them into another yard. Are you afraid there is any 
gas escaping in this yard? Count and look at those six that 
are marked. Do they seem to be doing anything? Yes. 
they seem to be doing better than any of them, seem to feel 
better, and getting to eat better than the rest. Next morn- 
ing. I see you have moved them? Yes, but it did not do 
an}^ good, they are dying now. How are those six? There 
is nothing wrong with them; they seem to be thriving, starl- 
ing up a little. They will not die, you always lose the good 
ones, you say. x\fter awhile. You say they have let up dy- 
ing; that you lost fifteen; and five that had it are going to get 
well; that ten of them did not seem to have it and are doing 
well now. How are those six? They are some of the ten 
that are doing well now. Mark those five now that you are 
sure will get well. After awhile. You say they have begun 
to die again. What ones? Why the good ones, the ones I 
marked first. You say thev were doing fine and got so they 
were eating well, and you thought they w^ould not have it; 
and now they have begun to die. You were feeding them 
heavy, so as to start up those five. Yes, I thought they were 
over it and I wanted to get those five started. Well, did you? 
Yes! Well, watch the five now. See how they sleep. You 
say they sleep with their noses stuck up in the air, and even 
lean against and partly stand up in the nest, but what they 



23 

will have their noses up. After awhile. How are they now? 
All dead but those five, that I told you would get well. Are 
you sure all those five will get well? Yes, because they have 
all started to do well You have not any more you want to 
put in with them and try to cure? No, the rest are all dead. 
Well it would not matter; those five have been through the 
fire; it will be a long time before they get to eating heavy 
again, and nature seems to have taught them a lesson. They 
know the smell of the stuff that made them sick and for a long- 
time they will keep their noses in the air more, till the poisons 
work off of the bunch into the air, instead of into their lungs 
and stomach. 

Now here is a farmer that has got in a bottle a sure pop 
cure for all this bad management. He must have miracles 
bottled up in his bottle. You will find he is one of those fel- 
lows that doctors by the bunch; he don't know, if he should 
cure one, when it started to get well that it would poison its 
mate; he merely saves the sick one so it can kill the well one: 
he doctoi's by the bunch; he is more afraid of the one that is 
dead, or about dead, the one that can't cast off his impurities, 
than he is the one that is getting well and is casting its impuri- 
ties into the others' stomach and lungs through their noses. 
This is the way the farmer doctors. Now here is what you 
will find around a farmer that is troubled with the hog cholera 
very often : A lot of railsplitting brood sows with a lot of pigs 
suckling them. True he gives them plenty of old, dry corn, 
but that w^ill not keep their strength and system up in hot 
weather; they are in this shape all through the hot part of the 
summer; he is not afraid of losing them by using them this 
way; he knows he can get them in better condition when new 
corn comes on. He has not time to have the corn ground till 
after a while, then he w ill get them something they will like. 



24 

His mind is on the pigs; he is pushing them all summer on 
his cows' milk. So the old sows are neglected; they lose 
strength; the pigs nearly eat them up; their hide becomes dry 
and hair dead; they get in a bad condition and dry up so they 
don't give any milk. After a while one will get out and get 
in the potato patch and corn field and get some green corn, 
and keep getting out for about a week or ten days till he gets 
the fence fixed so it will hold her. Green corn makes her 
thrive even if she did steal it; he has her in with the pigs; they 
sleep with her which means sure death to them. Now, those 
impurities which come from her old hide go hard with their 
lungs and stomach. But the green corn did not hurt her, and 
you or I never saw it hurt an old sow; she likes it and she 
had been in need of it, or something else like it for a long 
time. This is the easy way to get cholera among your hogs, 
though some men keep all their hogs in good shape, and some 
hog will get hurt by accident and not thrive for a long while, 
and they will allow it to run with the others till it does go to 
thriving; then their trouble. But ym will find they don't have 
it always. But I thing after a sow has had the strain upon 
their system, of raising a litter of pigs through hot weather, 
they should be kept away from the pigs after the pigs are 
weaned. 

Now how winter helps you out. You have thirty shoats; 
you put in an old sow or two, that are loaded just right; they 
start to thrive; now if it is cold, every shoat that lays with his 
nose against them over night is not apt to get well; being cold> 
they will not last long. The whole thirty can not all breathe 
off them at once, so they will kill as many as breathe off them 
each night. Of course these will linger some, but not long, 
and they will never cast it out, or their impurities into the 
others. So when the old sows have thrown the worst of it 



25 

out of their systems into the air and noses of those that are 
dead or going to die; then the shoats will quit dying: they 
will not ^et poisoned by any of the sick ones getting well, so 
two or three old sows among them in cold weather will not 
kill so man}^, or be the cause of killing so many when it is cold 
as they will in warm weather. The poison only comes from 
the old sows, say in cold w^eather, or the hog that has been in 
a bad condition for a long time, where in warm weather this 
hog poisons a lot of them, then some start to get well and 
poison those that this hog failed to. 

Now what I say now I don't pretend is any more than 
what you can prove to yourself if you will investigate it. 
I am a farmer and what I write you would expect to be writ- 
ten as a farmer would write. Now how does it come that a hog 
will get so poisonous that he will poison his mate when the 
poison is cast out of him? I have told you how these hogs 
that accumulate these poisons are cared for; now I will tell 
you another thing that aids them. If you are a farmer you 
have heard and know since you w^ere a boy that when an old 
sow gets run down in this shape that I have been telhng you 
about, that it takes as much feed as she is worth to get her 
in condition again. Now I'll tell you what happens to that 
sow. When the sow is thriving and strong her outside hide 
is porous, called among us farmers as the scurf. It is a kind 
of a spong}^ arrangement; seems to be a kind oi an after 
thought of nature to keep things from stopping up the pores 
in her true skin; from the outside acts Hke a guard; it's the 
outside protection of the pores in the main hide. Now when 
the sow is strong and properly cared for this outside hide keeps 
porous and spongy, and does the work nature intended it to 
do. Now remember this work is to keep outside harm away 
from the pores in her main hide. This outside hide gets its 



26 

life and strength trom the system of the sow and pays for it 
in this way, and this is all it will do for her; this outside hide 
is a protection of life. Nature intended this outside hide to 
do another work, but not for her life. This is the safety valve: 
as long as it receives proper nourishment it will do the first 
work nature intended it to do faithfully. Now this outside 
hide will allow a certain amount of impurities to pass through 
it and escape into the air and no more at one time, that is they 
have to pass just as it receives its strength to allow them to 
pass; that is the price it demands; those are the only condi- 
tions in which they are allowed to pass. This is the other 
w^ork nature intended to do, and that is the price nature in- 
tended it should demand; no way can these impurities come 
out through this outside hide from this old sow. till this price 
has been paid. It does no credit business; they can pass 
through the main skin by cupfuls or like going through cloth, 
but they can not pass this outside scurf, or hide, till it receives 
its price. Now nature intended this outside hide to hold those 
poisons from coming out when they got too poisonous, to pro- 
tect the rest of the herd, which it will do till man off-sets it, 
which he does by protecting her, the sow, from wild beasts 
which would prey upon her w^hile she was in this weak state. 
He lacks the wild beasts here in Iowa and he does not count 
on this lack of service to the rest of the herd. Now^ this out- 
side hide becomes as a thin rubber as she becomes more im- 
pure. Now she cannot eat any thing unless it is easy to di- 
gest and carry off some impurities with it, and pass off fast 
and leave strength in her system. Well she would not get 
this if she was in a wild state, very quickly. You see nature 
did not intend her to be doctored; it intended her to be des- 
troyed by other animals that would prey upon; that was na- 
ture's intentions, for to protect the health of the rest of the 



27 

herd. But man sets aside nature's plan. In regard to this 
old sow, his yards protect her and hold her among the rest. 
Still this outside hide does its work faithfully for months, to the 
rest; it has become, now, almost like rubber, and it holds back 
those poisons well. Now between it and the main skin there 
is a thin layer of impurities that has lain there for weeks, held 
by this rubber hide; not all over her body, for she keeps rub 
bing and loosens up this scale in places and allows some of 
the poison to escape; but all over her back and where she 
cannot rub this scale holds them firm. Well, this poison that 
she rubs loose does a little harm, gives the rest a cough by 
getting on their lungs, and hurts their digestion by coming 
into their stomach, and causes worms to be created in their 
stomach. But that is all the harm it does them yet, for her 
outside hide is faithfully protecting them from any large 
amount, while they sleep with her. Now this scale cannot be 
soaked up with water; water will run off of it as it will a rub- 
ber boot. Now man knowS how he can aid this old sow to 
break this scale. He knows she must have strength ; he knows 
of no medicine that will do it; he knows of feeds, though, that 
will give her strength ; something as green corn, a tender, fresh, 
easy digested, strength giving food, that will begin slowly but 
surely and build up her strength and make her strong to 
force off this outside scale. Now this outside hide does not 
come to life as she gets her strength, but is forced up and off 
of her in flakes. Now you see it demanas a guarantee that 
she has the ability to live before it will move and allow the 
others to be destroyed. But this feed is easy for her to get 
now; he, the man. gets it for her in plenty, so in time she 
shows her ability to live; nature has her price, the rubber like 
scale is forced up and begins breaking up as ice in a river, the 
poisons that have been held are freed. Now for a few days 



28 

it is death to those hogs that sleep with her. Now this poison 
begins to escape slowly at first; the rest of the herd don't know 
that death is in their camping place; they rove around in the 
day; they feel better in thr day after they have been around 
awhile, but every morning they feel worse; they feel as if the 
gas had been blown out in the night, but not gas enough es- 
caped to kill them. But these that are getting this poison 
have outside hide, too, and it is beginning to act for the pro- 
tection of those that are not gc-tting the poison; it closes down 
on them; it shuts off anything from passing from their pores 
in their main hide. It works as good on them as it did on the 
old sow; nothing can pass through this scale on this hog that 
is getting poisoned from that old sow. Take hold of the hog 
and see how smooth and like rubber that scale has become: 
see the pale purple underneath it. Now this hog does not 
have the chance this old sow had; he can't eat the good feed 
in the dav time, and he is breathing poison into his stomach and 
lungs at night; also it is coming off the old sow^ faster; now he 
is doing the only way that is left to him to get rid of some 
that he gets, vomiting and scouring; his strength is gone and 
he dies. Look at him now, see the deep purple color he has. 
After the animal heat has left him take a stick and scratch 
away the scale and see if I have you the truth told. When 
this hog is dead he is also a danger to the others in two ways, 
if it is in the nest where they sleep The scale loses its power 
to protect the others; it loses its life and becomes as bad gam, 
so to speak, and will rub off exposing a layer of poisonous 
matter, which, if it be in the nest, the others may breathe off. 
Neither should well hogs be allowed to devour such a hog, 
for it is impure. The poisons on it are mostly on the outer 
side of it. I have seen them start to devour such a hog and 
go to vomiting before the}^ hardly got its hide cut through. 



29 

I don't say it will kill the hog by eating the other, but it may 
be the cause of getting him in a condition that he will give 
the kill to the others. 

I want to say this will not help some men from having 
the hog cholera among their hogs. You see a man wants to 
know what he is about, and that some men will not learn. 
The preventative is care and a proper understanding of how 
the hog should be cared for. It requires steady care and 
w^atchfulness, and that is something some men will not give. 
Medicine, they think, is easily given; they want to learn how 
to cure them by the bunch, and that end of this thing I have 
not tried to do. All I claim is they need not have this trouble 
by the bunch. I have written this from tests and I surely 
don't want to tell you an untruth. 

I say next summer take a sow that has raised six or eight 
pigs on dry corn through hot weather; take her and put her 
in with some young hogs; feed her anything that is good, that 
will build her strength up, and if they don't fight her and not 
sleep w^ith her they will get poisoned. Here is something to 
show you how 'easily you could get beat. I saw a man shut 
up twenty hogs in a pen to fatten, and it was about six weeks 
before they began to die. Some of thera got to be tine hogs. 
I kept watch of these hogs; that is, I saw them w'hen he put 
them up and twice afterwards. His yard was new; four of 
these hogs were about half fat, fair hogs; the other sixteen 
W'ere in fair condition. It was hot and dry ; had no large showers. 

Now if you had not known something of this bunch of 
hogs, you would not be able to tell him where he made his 
mistake. 

Well, when he put them in the pen, there were four bar- 
rows that were doing w^ell and eating well; they were good 
hogs, only they needed to be fed a while longer. The others 



30 

were sixteen old brood sows, that had been kept up pretty 
well, but not quite high enough, so I made up m^^ mind to 
keep track of them and I made a trip to see them after they 
had been in awhile. I found that the sixteen sows were doing 
greatly, very fine, but the four were doing nothing. Now he 
thought his hogs were doing very well. His mind was on 
these old sows; the}' were doing well, so he thought; every- 
thing Wcis as it should be. About six weeks from the time he 
put them up, the}^ began to die. Now when I saw them, the 
four were starting to thrive, and the sixteen were beginning 
to die. Now the sixteen were very nice hogs before they 
started to die, and the four were in fair shape, and you could 
see they were thriving. Now when he put them up, those 
sixteen had not been kept up well enough. But they were 
not Very impure, but impure enough to pois(m the four that 
were eating heavy, knocking them off their feed and keeping 
them in a bad state of health for live or six weeks in hot 
weather, before they got to thriving again. But the poison 
was not strong enough to kill them; but now, you see, this 
poison grew, so to speak, by causing the other four to become 
very poisonous. Now when they started to thrive, they be- 
gan to kill the sixteen, six weeks or more after they had been 
n this new yard. Now these four hogs were put in, good 
and pure hogs, and turned to be the death of some of the oth- 
ers, and you rolling corn and w^ater to them. Now let me say, 
you are so used to saying swine plague and hog cholera that 
those names sound ghostly to you. You don't think you are 
able to handle a ghost, but try to kill him with medicine. 
Now I tell you there is only one thing you can drive a ghost 
away from you with, mix up a little reason and give it and it 
will take it and go away. Do not think there is anything 
sneaking from one farm to another to kill your hogs. If any- 



31 

thing comes, it will be a hog, and if he gives them anything, 
they will have to sleep with him. Now he v^^ill not give them 
a ghost, but poison. Now say hog poison to yourself, that 
cion't seem so ghostly, you could handle that. Yes, you can 
handle that, you can cause it to be thrown into their lungs and 
stomach, or into the air; can cause it to be accummulated or 
not, just as you like. Now here is a man that did not try to 
raise many hogs, and what he did try to raise he said would 
always die. Here is the way he would try. He had a small 
pen, two or three brood sows. Well, they would raise him 
six or eight pigs apiece; the pigs would do well all summer: 
he would feed them on the outside of the pen. But the old 
sows would get dry, hard corn and tht* pigs would suck until 
the sows would become drv. Now the heat of the summer, 
with these pigs suckling them, would get them very weak 
and impure. Now step up to their pen, pull out some of their 
hair. See how easy it comes Don't you see it is dead? 
Look at the ends of it. Why don't they shed it? Says he, 
"I will soon have some new corn, I am going to feed it as 
soon as I can; I aint afraid of green corn giving them the 
cholera; I will make those old sows slick off, and you wont 
know them ." So he begins to feed it. In a few days his 
pigs begin to cough. Now they sleep right up closely to 
those old sows, but it don't seem to help their cough. Now, 
in a while, they begin to get wormy, now their eyes begin to 
water, now they begin to vomit or scour, now they begin to 
wheeze and shiver, now they begin to die. Now he was 
right, you would not know those old sows. Bad disease 
among shoats, he says. That is another one of his ghost 
words. If he would say distemper, it would not make him 
feel so creepy and he would hunt for something wrong that 
he could find. Now which ones would he suppose would die, 



32 

the shoats or the old sows; or in other words, the ones that 
are casting off their impurities, or the ones that are taking 
them into their lungs and stomach? Now a hog that dies 
quick with this poison, his lungs you will not find affected 
much. He got too much of it in his stomach at once, killing 
him before his lungs got bad. He could not empty his stom- 
ach quick enough. But one that has lived aw^hile after he 
has got poisoned, you will easily see the effects of it in his 
lungs, d3^ing from the destruction of both lungs and stomach. 
Now if you think it is a good thing to purify your old 
sows among your young hogs in the fall, you will soon think 
different. You see they get their noses so close to the doors 
that you cast those impurities out of. •x\nd that is not all; 
they draw the stuff into them. And that is not all; they help 
your cast out draw it, the impurities, out of your old sows. 
Now^, this poisonous matter. It is where it goes that makes 
your shoats so sick, first thing, right into their lungs and stom- 
ach. If it came out and struck their foot, it would not hurt 
them. Now the trouble with us has been that we have been 
foolish enough to think that Nature would create the hog to 
sleep in bunches, and fail to provide a protection for them. 
They might be entirely destroyed if that was the case. But 
Nature did give them protection, and it will try to the ver}- 
last to protect them. You can put three hogs in a pen and 
cause them to have the cholera and Nature will save one, if 
you will remove them as they die. One must get well if you 
don't kill it with your medicine. That is like this, you see. 
You have two nice hogs in a pen. Now get an old sow that 
needs purifying, put her in with them. Now get some new 
corn or something like it and feed her. Now^ she will be 
ready in a few days to prove to Nature her ability to live. So 
she throws off this deadly stuff, the other to breathe it; will 



say one dies. You get ^our bottle and go at the other one. 
You drag it to one side of the pen; it gets up to her the next 
night. But we will say you had a miracle in your bottle, and 
one starts to get well; you feed it when it gets strong; it will 
prove to Nature its ability to live and kill the other one. l^ut 
it will live, unless you have another miracle, to get the other 
one well and kill him. But you could not kill him. Nature 
throws another protection around him. Now if your shoats 
were very wormy when they died, or when they were dying, 
it was because they had been getting some poisons, before 
they got the dose that started to kill them. That is like this; 
some C)f 3'our old sows, the best ones of course, started to cast 
off their impurities, which was not strong enough to kill, but 
caused your shoats to cough and become wormy. Now when 
the poorest ones of the old hogs started, your pigs began dy- 
ing. Or if your pigs had got poisoned too much, when some 
of them started, they would set the rest to d\ing. 

Now if you will do as this. Keep your sows up while 
the pigs are suckling, give them good slops through hot 
weather, and when you wean your pigs, keep them away 
from the old hogs; and remember, it is when the impure hog 
goes to thriving that he injures the others. Don't put an old 
sow in with hogs you have been feeding some time, to cast off 
among them. Remember in hot weather it is hard on fat 
hogs. Keep them doing something or sell them. But as 
long as they are all doing well, you need not fear the cholera. 
Now 3'ou see a bunch of hogs that have the cholera; on the 
other side of a wire fence you see another bunch that is all 
right; one bunch is 3'oung hogs sleeping with \'oung hogs; 
the other bunch is some young hogs sleeping with some old, 
impure brood sows that are casting off their impurities. 

t .rfC 



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